It's been a long wait for Windows 8 users of Mozilla's Firefox browser, but there is now light at the end of the tunnel for those people who have been waiting for the "Modern" UI version to be released as a non-beta build. This week, Mozilla's development calendar page was updated to state that the Modern version of Firefox will be included with the launch of Firefox 26 on December 10th.

The calendar also mentions that earlier builds of the Modern UI version will be made available on Mozilla's Aurora channel on September 16, which Mozilla will publicize as the "Metro Preview Release", a reference to Microsoft's now discontinued term for the UI of Windows 8. The build will enter the Firefox Beta release channel on October 28th.

This version of Firefox will be released just for Windows 8 as Mozilla has decided not to release Firefox for Windows RT. This was due to an earlier decision by Microsoft not to allow any third party browsers to run on the OS in the classic desktop mode. While Mozilla publicly criticized Microsoft on this move, it did not stop work on the Windows 8 version.